"As ringleader, maestro, and indomitable troubadour of Nashville's most private, elusive, and exclusive far-out scene -- the Dead End -- visionary artist and Nashville lifer Chance Martin (aka Alamo Jones, the Voice in Black, aka the Stoned Ranger) could have stepped from the pages of a Portis novel, Barry Hannah story, or Coen Bros. script. After working for and touring with his friend and mentor Johnny Cash as cue card man, stage manager, and lighting designer for eight years, in 1977 Chance began a new life. By the time he was thirty-one, he had already worked stagehands union gigs for all the greats, hung with them and partied with them backstage, and realized that it was now or never -- time to turn off all the outside influences, hunker down, and make it new, or else. So he started writing songs on Johnny Cash's D35 Martin, a gift from the master. Chance and his gang holed up in the Dead End, the kitted-out 'bonus room' above his parents' garage on a cul-de-sac in a residential South Nashville neighborhood, complete with reel-to-reels, bed, bar, a Head of Security, and a Sergeant at Arms. Under the direction of Chance as guru, they spent five years in secrecy and self-imposed musical isolation, writing songs and recording endless hours of work tapes. The result was In Search (1981), a fierce, inimitable, and mythmaking countrydelic masterpiece of insular inspiration and absolutely singular vision and scope. Despite its intensely personal origins, long gestation, substantial financial costs, and deadly serious deliberation, the album betrays very little in the way of outside influences or traceable authorship. Commanding, aggressive, and unabashedly masculine, it literally sounds like nothing else we've ever heard -- this is as close as we've gotten to unique music (if there is such a thing), the real deal, an obsessive, private-press triumph of the imagination. The closest analog we can (tentatively) venture is some unholy pot likker of Waylon Jennings, Funkadelic, the Fields of Nephilim, and the Bob Seger System: a strange southern gothic, alternately frightening and funky, and utterly transfixing. One can only wonder as to which interstellar channels Chance is tuned, but whatever he's hearing is not the same transmission that the rest of us hear. And God bless him for it. Paradise of Bachelors is ecstatic to present the first-ever reissue of this long-coveted collectors' item, complete with dozens of outrageous photos and a 13,000-word oral history of Chance in a gatefold package. So sit back, listen to this remarkable document, and live with Chance for a spell. Live the search."

"In the city we're all angling for quittin' time, laboring along and among the hours, searching and scheming for the sweet sound of those two easy words: Time Off. It's something you take -- or sometimes steal, like a thief or a baserunner -- but seems you can never get enough of it. It's regulated, rationed, and billed by volume, like water or electricity or ice cream. Sometimes you have to beg the boss for more, or even for a trifling taste. So let's make time! Let's roll the dice and get these old bones out on the road again. Steve Gunn's new album imagines the fugitive moments afforded us during time off, out, and away as occasions for dilatory investigations into our immediate environments and interiors. Time Off showcases the virtuosic guitarist and songwriter's oblique character sketches and story-songs, some of which, like 'Lurker' and 'Street Keeper,' portray specific denizens of his Brooklyn neighborhood. 'Old Strange' celebrates Jack Rose, a dear and departed friend and muse. Those contemplative studies frame Gunn's most affecting, accessible and articulate work of pure song-craft to date. His definitive statement as a songwriter, Time Off represents the culmination of nearly fifteen years of stylistic experimentation as a solo artist, a member of GHQ and the Gunn-Truscinski Duo, and more recently, as a guitarist in fellow Philadelphia-bred troubadour Kurt Vile's touring band the Violators. Gunn's first eponymous album with a full band, Time Off harnesses a core trio format to launch his compositions into new, luminous strata; the songs have evolved through disciplined trio interplay with longtime collaborator John Truscinski on drums and Justin Tripp (formerly of Aspera and Favourite Sons) on bass and guitar. Helena Espvall (Espers) also guests on cello. Steve's keen baritone voice features more prominently than ever before on these tunes, each of which feels both more rigorous and expansive than previous efforts."

"LP version. Comes in a tip-on jacket with full color inner sleeve and digital download coupon. Haw, herein, is an album of eleven songs about family, faith, and an ill-prophesied future, an artifact almost as archaic, lovely and seldom heard today as directional commands for beasts of burden. M.C. Taylor, who wrote these songs, once lived hard by the Haw with his wife Abigail and their son Elijah ? 'Well I come from the bottom of the river Haw,' he sings -- but he doesn't live there anymore. Having followed the slipstream to the relative bustle of nearby Durham, North Carolina, he has composed a new clutch of tunes that conjure the half-remembered dreams of peace promised by our pasts. Taylor's writing and singing here achieve a tenebrous clarity, invoking -- and occasionally challenging -- a intermingling cast of prophetic characters both sacred and profane: Daniel, Elijah, the Apostles, and the Son of Man, sure, but also the Peacock Fiddle Band, Mississippi John Hurt, and by implication, Lew Welch, Waylon Jennings, Michael Hurley, and our friend Jefferson Currie II. 'Say whatever prayer you want: to Jehovah or Yahowah, or Red Rose Nantahala.' More than ever before, the supporting players of Hiss Golden Messenger feature as tellers of the tale. Each episode earns a meticulously turned ensemble statement."

"Haw, herein, is an album of eleven songs about family, faith, and an ill-prophesied future, an artifact almost as archaic, lovely and seldom heard today as directional commands for beasts of burden. M.C. Taylor, who wrote these songs, once lived hard by the Haw with his wife Abigail and their son Elijah - 'Well I come from the bottom of the river Haw,' he sings -- but he doesn't live there anymore. Having followed the slipstream to the relative bustle of nearby Durham, North Carolina, he has composed a new clutch of tunes that conjure the half-remembered dreams of peace promised by our pasts. Taylor's writing and singing here achieve a tenebrous clarity, invoking -- and occasionally challenging -- a intermingling cast of prophetic characters both sacred and profane: Daniel, Elijah, the Apostles, and the Son of Man, sure, but also the Peacock Fiddle Band, Mississippi John Hurt, and by implication, Lew Welch, Waylon Jennings, Michael Hurley, and our friend Jefferson Currie II. 'Say whatever prayer you want: to Jehovah or Yahowah, or Red Rose Nantahala.' More than ever before, the supporting players of Hiss Golden Messenger feature as tellers of the tale. Each episode earns a meticulously turned ensemble statement."

"Paradise of Bachelors presents the first-ever reissue of the previously obscure 1983 LP by the Red Rippers. Written and recorded by Navy pilot Edwin Bankston, the album's nine battle-scarred country-boogie dispatches chronicle the experiences of Bankston and his fellow vets in Vietnam and back home. Scarce and seemingly inscrutable, the sole recording credited to the Red Rippers has long captivated and mystified record collectors. When we first encountered Over There... and Over Here, we were fascinated by the prescient, genre-dredging synthe- sis of Waylonesque honky-stomp with early '80s new wave production values and eerie, out-of-time psychedelic guitar leads, weirdly reminiscent of the Blue Öyster Cult and the Meat Puppets at their most desert-drunk. We were intrigued by the record's ambiguous provenance (Oracle Records?) and moved by its complex, apparently deeply personal articulation of an enlisted man's efforts to break on through his fear, anger, and disillusionment during and after the Vietnam War."

"Paradise of Bachelors is honored to celebrate the life and music of influential songwriter, singer, and guitarist Willie French Lowery (1944-2012) with the first-ever reissue of the sole eponymous album by his interracial swamp-psych band Plant and See. Originally released in 1969 on L.A. label White Whale--home of Jim Ford, the Turtles, and the Rockets--Plant and See is the strange fruit of disparate people, places, and players in dialogue. Its humid, storm-cloud guitars, ductile vocal harmonies, and intuitive, loose-limbed drumming are redolent of a specifically Southern syncretic musical identity and sense of place, testifying to the outstanding, colorblind musicianship of Lowery, African American drummer Forris Fulford, Latino bassist Ron Seiger, and Scotch-Irish backup vocalist Carol Fitzgerald." Deluxe tip-on gatefold jacket.